An Inside Look At The Biggest Restaurant Trends In 2018

“The trends we have here are what we see in the world, rather than what we aspire to see in the world. If it were up to me, the trends we would be going through today would be about a living wage and the death of tiny napkins, but we are likely going to talk about Instagram more than either of those things," jokes Jason Clampet, co-founder and editor-in-chief at Skift Inc., surveying a room of chefs, media and hospitality professionals at this year's Terroir symposium in Toronto.

Although Clampet is clearly speaking in jest, there's a marked point in what he says. Trend lists, even ones that focus on operational elements such as the Skift's industry-focused Megatrends he’s come here to discuss, tend to look at minimum wage mainly in terms of labor costs rather than the effect on the well-being of employees. And even if lists do cover living wage issues, because they come from an industry perspective, they are sometimes lost in the consumer press and public perception behind evergreen topics such as sustainability, millennial pleasing or locavorism.

Jason Clampet, co-founder and general manager at Skift Inc. at the 2018 Terroir Symposium in Toronto.Leslie Wu

Clampet is in this room at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a representative of Skift Table, which brought the irreverent Skift take (“we’ve grown up since then,” says Clampet at one point) to the Chef+Tech newsletter a year ago. Wisecracking his way through a slide deck with snarky asides, Clampet covers off a look at the hospitality industry’s biggest game changers for 2018 — and here are two of his top picks.

The Instagram effect on restaurant design

Replacing billboards with restaurant interior design to attract the customer attention, hospitality design trends are about speaking in shouts rather than whispers. The company sees neon and other bright colors (“ultraviolets that are more likely to be seen in Vogue than at the farmers' market,” he says) and fun sayings all being used to adorn restaurant walls. "I really like minimalist Japanese and Scandinavian design, but that doesn't really work for a world that's fueled by social sharing,” says Clampet. “I don't like the idea of thinking of just a plate that has a full name on it so that you can see it on social media, but we can't pick our trends all the time, if we're honest.”

The effect of social media in the hospitality sphere is having a larger impact than just the color of the walls or plates. As restaurants become increasingly attuned to the Instagram influence (and influencers), the separation of the act of experiencing food and actually eating it widens, changing the nature of the dining room and also the back of house. Readers of this column may remember my article on the intense labor behind viral dishes such as Dakota Weiss’ The Rolling Stone, which brought crowds of clientele into the restaurant but also required the hiring of extra staff dedicated solely to one item in order to avoid disruption in service.

A casual take

As a relative newcomer to reporting on the restaurant business, Clampet brings a different perspective to industry terminology. “One of the things that we had to learn when starting to cover this industry about a year ago is all these terms that don't make sense to humans,” he says. “They make sense to people in the industry — the difference between fine and fast casual, and upscale casual and casual and things like that — but when it comes to consumers, I think if you ask them the difference between fast food and fast casual, they'd say, ‘I don't know, $12?’”

He sees the distance between white tablecloth and plastic chair restaurants filling up with a consumer that desires to have better food and demand more with their meals. “Customer might not want a four course menu at chef's table, but they want to have something that tastes good and is sourced well and they're willing to pay twice as much as they would for it than they would a burger at Burger King,” he says. The fast casual (or fine casual) sphere relies less on staffing and gives the restaurant owners a reprieve in labor costs. “Even if you can't necessarily outfit a restaurant with a ton of waiters for table service, you can still offer quality food at a price level that's somewhat elevated somewhat and let the customers do some of the work,” he says.

Fast casual has long been the poster child of growth for the restaurant industry, even as fine dining wavered with reduced spending from consumers. “America, it appears, is no longer a Fast Food Nation. It’s a Fast-Casual Nation,” wrote Tim Carman in The Washington Post last year, reporting on Cracker Barrel entering the category. Some industry experts, such as trade publication Nation’s Restaurant News, have been covering the decline of such restaurants, however, citing overaggressive expansion, competition from other segments and market saturation as causes. “And much of the problem is simply that the market is tough and fast-casual chains are not immune to that,” wrote Jonathan Maze in NRN. Whether fast casual will survive as fine casual or another incarnation altogether, industry experts will be watching.

In both design and service, the restaurant market continues to change and adapt to technology and consumer perception…and hopefully, aspiration.

Note: The name of the Chef+Tech newsletter has been edited from a previous version of this article.

Leslie Wu is a food and travel writer. Follow her on Twitter at @leslie_wu.

I’m a Toronto-based freelance writer who has spent the last 17 years traveling the globe as a magazine editor, and a lifetime consuming and exploring the world’s most interesting plates. A former editorial director of several national trade magazines on food, restaurants an...